[time-nuts] Re: function generator

[Jeremy Elson]

I own a DG1022Z and have used it for time-nuttery from time to time. It's
not the best device for such a thing, unfortunately.

The positive: you can plug a 10mhz reference clock in the back and the
DG1022Z will lock to it. The internal oscillator appears to be a
garden-variety crystal (mine has an error of roughly 1E-6) and an external
oscillator, e.g. Rubidium or GPSDO, will improve the performance
significantly. You can also have the DG1022Z *emit* a clock signal, which
is not a useful thing to do for a time-nut since the oscillator is not very
useful.

The negative: the frequency synthesizer is not up to the standards you
might expect as a time-nut. When trying to test a new time interval counter
of my own design, I plugged an RbXO into the DG1022Z and simply asked the
DG1022Z to divide it down to a 1pps signal. That is, I configured it to
create a pulse with a small duty cycle and 1hz frequency using the external
clock as a reference. To my surprise, it introduces a small but
measurable error of one part in 1E11 in the dividing-down. You can read the
full story of this in my post from earlier this year:
https://febo.com/pipermail/time-nuts_lists.febo.com/2021-April/103329.html.
I ended up instead buying a TADD-2 (
https://tapr.org/product/tadd-2-pulse-per-second-divider/) and this worked
perfectly.

Regards,
-Jeremy


On Sun, Nov 21, 2021 at 1:13 PM folkert <folkert at vanheusden.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> A few days ago I bought a Rigol DG1022Z function generator.
> Works really well from what I can see. Especially compared to my
> previous solution (a sound-card in my laptop with a few resistors and a
> capacitor to adjust the signal level) :-)
> Now I noticed that on the back there are a few bnc connectors. One of
> them is for a 10MHz external clock.
> My question now is: would it make sense to connect a reference clock to
> it of some sort? I probably won't *need* it strictly spoken for my
> current experiments (verify the frequency response of audio circuits)
> but I like to get the maximum out of my gear :-)
>
>
> regards
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